


Pages Between Us Written With No End

by starrywrite



Category: Video Blogging & YouTube RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Death, M/M, Suicide, this is really weird tbh and not a typical 'phan' fic but i hope someone enjoys it regardless yeah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:24:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrywrite/pseuds/starrywrite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t even know him, but apparently that doesn’t matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pages Between Us Written With No End

**Author's Note:**

> idrk where this came from ok i got the idea in the car driving to walmart with my mom and it was raining and i was listening to like one direction or something so it literally makes no sense where all this angst came from and this is probably really dumb and makes no sense im sorry but yeah here the things enjoy
> 
> ps if you havent heard it yet today, i love you :*
> 
> disclaimer: phan is not real and i am in no way claiming this couple is real. i just ship them kinda hard.

It’s raining the day it happens, and Phil’s hair is a frizzy mess under the hood of his sweatshirt that won’t quite stay up right. He’s walking home from work, a decision he’s now regretting because he’s caught in the midst of another shower; no surprise there, all it does in England is rain. But c’mon, he’s not a weatherman, how was he supposed to know it was going to start raining when he was halfway home from work? 

There’s a bridge he crosses to get home from work, it’s kind of arched and the sides are made of stone, and Phil thinks it looks cool. It’s at least sixteen feet high - maybe more - and underneath is a river (or whatever body of water it is, everyone just referred to it as a river) with the coldest water. A few years back, one of his friends dared him to jump in (from the ground that is, which isn’t even a jump at all if you get close enough) and Phil was dumb and jumped and he realized two things the second he had gone under: one, someone could seriously get hypothermia being in this water for longer than a few seconds and two, it was _really_ deep. Phil was a tall boy and when he realized his feet hadn’t touched the ground, he immediately panicked because who would’ve guessed that rivers were deep in the first place? (Phil wasn’t very bright in year nine because when he had gotten older he learned that rivers can be as deep as six feet until you reach the middle they can go as deep as thirty feet). 

As Phil crosses the bridge, his walk slows until he’s still as a statue because he sees someone on the opposite side of the bridge as he is, sitting on the ledge, their feet dangling over the other side, their body sort of swaying back and forth. The sight alone makes Phil nervous because it’s raining pretty hard and he imagines that the edge of the bridge is slippery; he tests his theory by running his hand atop of the stone ledge near him and it’s not entirely slippery like he thought, but Phil still feels a bit on edge by the sight of someone just sitting on a bridge like that. 

“Hey!” he calls out to them, hoping to catch their attention and warn them to be careful playing around the ledge of a bridge, because he’d rather be safe than sorry, right? 

The person sat on the edge of the bridge turns around; it’s a boy. He looks young, maybe a few years younger than Phil is, with a round face and dimples in his cheeks. His eyes are brown but they remind Phil of the dead autumn leaves in winter, and he shivers. 

“Be careful, yeah?” he tells him. He waits for the boy to tell him that he will or for him to just get down altogether. They stare at each other for a second and Phil realizes that he’s crying. Tears are streaming down his cheeks and he chokes on a sob, shaking his head for a moment and turning back around, his back to Phil once again.

Phil stands there, not sure what to take from what just happened, but he doesn’t feel comfortable just leaving the boy here. He’s clearly upset about something and Phil worries -

His thoughts are cut short when he sees the boy standing up, his legs shaking a little as he stands on the edge and he looks down, stretching one foot out forward, and it doesn’t take Phil long for him to realize he’s not getting down. 

“Hey, hey wait!” Phil yells at him, beginning to rush towards him. “Stop! Don’t!” 

But it’s not enough and as Phil rushes up to the opposite side of the bridge, the boy has thrown himself off. “ _No_!” Phil leans over the edge, his eyes wide and his chest heaving and all he can do is watch as the boy plummets downward, his body getting smaller and smaller until he’s disappeared underwater.

Phil’s never really been a religious person but at that moment, he prays and prays to see the boy’s head pop up from the water, gasping for breath and splashing about, trying to get to shore. 

Time ticks on but it doesn’t happen. 

Phil can’t breathe, he can’t think. He just witnessed someone jump off of a bridge - not even that, he just witnessed someone _kill_ themselves; just thinking the thoughts make him want to throw up and he seriously thinks that he’s going to start and vomit, but then he remembers that the boy’s body is in the river and Phil doesn’t want to throw up on him. Oh god, _the boy’s body is in the river._ Phil isn’t dumb; the drop was steep enough but with the river being so cold and so deep, he knows the boy doesn’t stand a chance. He’s gone. 

Phil’s body feels cold but he’s sweating, and his legs can’t hold him up for a second longer and he has to lower himself to the ground. He can’t take his eyes off the river below and every time he blinks he sees the boy jumping over and over again and _oh god_ , please make it stop., His heart’s beating so fast, too fast, he worries that he’s going to have a heart attack if he doesn’t calm down but he can’t calm down, how could he calm down? 

And he’s crying too because someone just died and Phil wasn’t enough to stop him and fuck, why wasn’t he enough? Why couldn’t he have just stopped the boy from jumping? 

He feels a hand on his shoulder and he jumps out of his skin, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” it’s a woman, an older woman that Phil doesn’t know. She’s got one hand on his shoulder, the other holding her phone up to her ear. “I’ve got 999 on the phone,” she explains to him. “Can you tell me what happened, sweetheart?” 

She thinks that Phil knows the boy. Does she think they were friends, brothers? But Phil doesn’t know this boy and he can’t stop crying over him. “He jumped,” he whispers, the words tasting bitter on his tongue and he can’t stop shaking. “I - I tried to stop him but he…” Phil can’t say anymore, he can’t but he whispers once again, “I tried to stop him,”

* * *

Phil’s mum has to drive and pick him up from the bridge because he’s in no state to walk the rest of the way home, or at least that’s what the policeman tells him and he calls Phil’s mum and tells him to pick her son up. The policeman also tells him that he did the right thing and he did all he could. But Phil can’t hear anything except for the paramedics announcing the boy dead after they’ve found his body in the river. An autopsy will determine if the cause of death was the impact of the fall or from drowning or both. They call him John Doe too and it sounds wrong because Phil knows that’s not his name.

Phil doesn’t know why but he just wants to know the boy’s name. 

His mum takes him home. She doesn’t make him talk about what happened (she knows the SparkNotes version - that a boy jumped from the bridge and Phil tried to stop him. The policeman was nice enough to leave out the part where Phil couldn’t stop him but he tells his mum the same thing he told Phil, “he did all he could”), and Phil suspects she doesn’t even know what to say. If there’s some sort of mom handbook he doubts there’s a chapter on What To Do When Your Child Witnesses A Suicide. Instead, she brings him home and asks him if he needs or wants anything, and Phil sits on the couch, looking up at his mom, whispering, “I _tried_ to stop him,” 

His mom holds him while he cries, and Phil cries himself dry in memory of the boy he couldn’t save.

* * *

There’s a news report on what happened at the bridge a few days later. Phil can hear the hum of the TV from his bedroom despite the fact that his mom lowered the volume when the newscaster began speaking of “the incident” (that’s what everyone called it now - “the incident”. Phil thought it sounded horribly cliched). 

The boy’s name was Dan Howell. 

Phil leaves his room for the first time in days to hide out in the hall and sneak a peek of the TV. The news report shows a picture of Dan, probably a school picture because it’s got a plain backdrop to it and Phil’s heart hurts because Dan’s beautiful. He’s got messy brown hair with a long fringe that falls slanted across his forehead and his eyes look warm instead of dead like Phil remembers, and he’s smiling. 

Phil closes his eyes because he wants Dan’s smile to be the last thing he remembers about the boy. 

* * *

A week passes, then another and Phil still doesn’t quite feel the same - no scratch that, he doesn’t know how he feels period. Because part of him feels guilty like he could’ve stopped this boy if he tried harder, and part of him feels sad because someone died, and part of him feels beyond fucked up because someone died and he watched it happen. 

Part of him feels angry at himself for feeling so affected by someone he didn’t even know, for being so messed up over the death of someone he didn’t even know, for feeling so like he didn’t try hard enough when he knows that he did all he could. When he feels angry, he immediately feels guilty again.

Part of him feels angry at Dan, which makes no sense because he didn’t know Dan. He didn’t know how fucked up the boy was - well, it’s only safe to assume that the poor boy was fucked up, he did throw himself off a bridge. He didn’t know what Dan was going through; was he abused, bullied? Or were all his problems internal and he felt like he had no one to turn to? 

Phil thinks about Dan a lot. He wonders about his parents, and how they heard the news of what happened to their son. He wonders if Dan had a brother or a sister or a lot of siblings or if he was an only child. He wonders if he has friends. He wonders who else is mourning Dan’s death.

Mostly, he wonders what was going inside of Dan’s head when he jumped. He wonders if halfway down, Dan regretted his decision and realized he made a mistake. He wonders if Dan truly found peace when he died. He wonders what could’ve kept Dan from jumping. He wonders why him telling him not to do it wasn’t enough. He wonders if he just needed someone to try a little harder and that thought alone keeps him up at night.

Instead of studying for mocks, Phil doodles Dan Howell’s name all over his notebook.

* * *

It’s been a month and Phil’s finally mustered up the courage to walk past the bridge again. His mom is skeptical about him walking anywhere but he reminds him that he has to get to work somehow and he convinces her that he’s fine, even though he isn’t sure that he is. But he’s acting like he is. He leaves his room and stops crying and even smiles sometimes. It’s almost as if Dan’s not the only thing on his mind nowadays, even though he still is. A month later, Dan’s still all Phil can think about. 

With his hands in his pockets, Phil walks the familiar path towards the bridge. It’s warm and the sun is shining bright above him, and it’s nothing like the day Dan died, yet Phil still feels like his heart’s going to beat right out of his chest and his stomach is doing flips. He’s nervous and he doesn’t know why because it’s not like Dan’s going to be there. But he’s nervous and shaking a little as he nears the edge of the bridge, and he cautiously leans against it, looking down at the water. 

He feels selfish but he wishes he could’ve saved Dan. He wishes he could’ve known Dan. He wishes he could’ve loved him. He wishes he could’ve been whatever he needed to keep him from killing himself. 

He doesn’t even realize he had started crying until his vision has gone blurry and he sniffles, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. It kind of feels good to cry, but at the same time, he knows crying won’t bring Dan back. But that alone makes him cry a little harder and it’s just a vicious cycle at the moment.

Phil wonders if it’s possible to miss someone you didn’t even know… miss them so badly that it hurts. 

He holds his head in his hands, sob escaping his lips and he thinks of Dan and he hopes that even though he’s dead now, that he’s happy. 

“Did you know him?” a voice asks, startling Phil, and he hastily wipes his eyes to see a boy that can’t be older than ten or eleven standing next to him. “The boy that jumped, did you know him?” he asks, and he has a right to assume so because Phil’s at the scene where it happened and he can’t stop crying.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know Dan and yet, he can’t stop crying over him and he can’t stop feeling guilty and he doesn’t understand why it had to be him. Why did he have to be the one to find Dan?

Phil just shakes his head. “No,” he said, wiping his eyes again. “I didn’t know him,” The two of them are silent for a moment, and Phil asks, “Did you know him?” 

The boy nods. “He was my brother,”

Phil literally feels his heart break, his chest is tight and it takes all his strength not to break down in tears once again. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out. 

He just nods and he’s silent again. Like Phil, he leans over the edge of the bridge, looking down at the water below them and he tells Phil, “Thank you,” Phil’s confused and then he adds, “I know you were the guy who found him and tried to save him… no one else tried to save him before you. So thank you,” 

A million questions are spinning around in Phil’s head and he wants to ask Dan’s brother all about Dan and what was wrong with him and if he was depressed, but all he says was, “That’s alright,” and he lingers for a second longer before he bids the boy adieu and leaves the bridge. 

He walks back the same way he came, headed home, and while he walks, he tilts his head back, squinting as he looks up at the sky, He wonders if Dan’s in Heaven, wonders if he’s an angel watching over him or his brother or his family and friends. He wonders if Dan knows he’s thinking about him. And he closes his eyes and he tells Dan, “I’m sorry I didn’t try hard enough, Dan Howell,”

The wind picks up a little, blowing past his fast, tickling his cheeks and Phil opens his eyes. He’s no expert, but he thinks Dan just told him, “It’s okay,”


End file.
